Frugal

Alright this post is a little overdue but it has a very important message. When you try to live a money conscious lifestyle, it is very important that you want where you spend money. Well on my last camping trip I had to run a quick trip to another store, during which my friends went and did the food shopping. Needless to say I regret that decision.

There was 4 of us and we were arriving at the camp site in the evening having already eaten dinner. We were staying the next full day and then having breakfast the following day before heading out. So in total thats 2 breakfasts, 1 lunch and 1 dinner for 4 people. For the first breakfast they bought:

1 Dozen Eggs (sounds more like a bed and breakfast, I know!)

1 Pack of bacon

1 Pack of breakfast sausages

I believe we ate all of the sausages (as they were cooked first) then maybe half of the eggs (if that) and one third of the bacon (I didn’t have any, which was not due to the fact they bought Extra Hearty Bacon)

Lets move on the Lunch. Normally a standard lunch for camping is hot dogs, and today was no exception. However we couldn’t get just regular hot dogs, we had to get the gourmet sausages. If that wasn’t enough we bought 2 packs of 6 each, so we had 12 sausages for 4 people for 1 meal. How on earth does that make sense to anybody?!? Oh wait it continues? We also bought 12 gourmet buns, and new packages of mustard, ketchup and relish (it would have much too hard to bring opened ones from home, or possibly take the packets from a fast food joint).

At this point half the bacon had been left cooking in the sun and looked rather disgusting as flies found the greatest meal of their short lives. Dinner was fast approaching, and we couldn’t be outdone by our wasted breakfasts and lunches, we again went for a traditional camping meal of hamburgers.

We got some frozen hamburgers (8 of them) that I was fine with, despite costing $8.00 for 8 patties and not being very big at all. Well guess what we had to have with the burgers you ask? Well we bought a head of lettuce (but no knife to cut it……) a thing of jalapeno cheese (I can’t remember exactly but it must have been close to a pound), 6 tomatoes (because they all came together in a bag), a brand new jar of sliced hamburger pickles and an onion. But yea no knife and no cutting board.

Before I go any further I should mention that we brought a propane BBQ with us (not a full sized one), but since we couldn’t find a mini propane tank (and that fast that us city slickers are far too civilized to us a BBQ pit….) we bought a full sized tank ($55) and brought it with us. The tank was straddled between somebody’s legs on the way up and when we asked the gas attendant if that was safe his response was “I could care less”. Please insert shocked facial expression here.

So we’ve covered the meals of the first day, oh but wait we missed all the snacks. You know those 2 giant bags of chips, the box of cookies, the 24 cans of coke (did I mention we weren’t even there a full 48 hours?), my homemade trail mix (the only food brought from home), the 24 bottles of water (the only purchase that was actually worth it). I’m fairly confident in that fact that I can’t remember some of the snacks too, which scares me a little bit.

Alright were on to the final meal which in all fairness wouldn’t have been too bad if it actually had got eaten, but of course it didn’t because we were in a rush and well hungover (it was camping after all). We got a pack of bagels, and a thing of cream cheese along with a 2L bottle of grapefruit juice (I’m afraid of what this actually cost, but going by the packaging it looked expensive.

Sigh, sometimes I think to myself about how much better it would have been to go into the store with them. Not just to stop them form buying twice as much food as we needed, but just to see the look on the clerks face when they said they were going for 1 day.…

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